For at least the past 20 years or so magazine publishers have tried to get away with paying authors by-the-word at a dime per word and without any future rights reverting back to the author.
Not only is ten-cents-a-word an outrageously bad sum of non-money — it denigrates the idea of “the whole of the writing” by breaking down the craft into its tiniest bits and not even its architectural pieces.
I’m thrilled to announce the availability of my latest book — Picture Yourself Learning Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard — published by Thomson/Cengage Learning.
Continue reading → Picture Yourself Learning Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
The $400.00USD Amazon Kindle eReader sold out in less than five hours on its debut day November 20th. The next batch sold out even quicker — I was lucky to get one delivered Friday — and the third batch of Kindles will not be available for purchase until after December 25th.
We recently wondered here — How Long is a Piece of String? — and today I’d like to take that question to the next thought to ask: “How Long is a Book?”
Continue reading → The Digital Age of Electronic Self-Publishing: How Long is a Book?
Do you brand your online life to identify the work you do in all aspects?
I love words. I love writing words. I love reading words. I love hearing words. I have a new WordPunk blog that deals with “words in the wilds.” The power of words is in their definition. Words have meanings only because they are shared in context and understood between people. Dictionaries help bridge the fuzzy confusion between definition and meaning. Imagine, then, my delight and horror in receiving this email from a university professor friend of mine:
Word came down from above that we are no longer allowed to use “niggle” or “niggly” or any variety thereof in writing or speaking with students because “they sound and look too much like that other word” (the N-word) and we don’t “want to upset the student body.” I thought they were joking at first until I also saw a warning against using “spook” in class, too.
The Boston Globe reported last week many top American universities are ignoring the writing portion of the SAT exam when deciding whether or not to admit high school students into their programs of study.
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